


You Can Count On Me

by MarleyMortis



Series: Bucky Barnes Starts A Family [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Afghanistan, Artificial Insemination, Bucky starts a family, Deployed Soldiers, Existing Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Hurt Bucky, Hurt Clint, Loved ones deployed in war, M/M, Sergeant Barnes, Soldier Bucky, Surrogate Mom, Wartime, bun in the oven, descriptions of injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 14:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9127042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarleyMortis/pseuds/MarleyMortis
Summary: Things go horribly wrong during a mission.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: There are some descriptions of the aftermath of wartime violence and medical triage.

**You Can Count On Me**

War was made up of long stretches of boredom interspersed with death-defying acts of idiocy the way Bucky saw it. Their greatest enemy wasn't violent ideology; they could shoot and kill violent ideology. It wasn't brown people; brown people were just people made up of an incredible array of differences, some of which happened to be violent. He was ninety-eight percent sure there was an equal number of white folks who would commit acts of violence if the west didn't have a better system of social pressure and a justice system. Hell, there were still pockets of white folks who would kill him for being a married gay man openly serving in the military if they could.

No, the greatest enemy of the soldier was boredom. You couldn't shoot boredom. You couldn't lock it in a prison cell. You could only read, hydrate, jerk off, and stare at the endless expanses of brown rocks, brown grass, and brown sky. Okay, maybe the sky wasn't brown, but you got a big enough dust storm, and it sure as shit looked brown.

He moved his sunglasses to the top of his head and glanced out at the horizon. The trail of dust in the distance caused him to look sharp. He shouldered his rifle and glanced down the scope, quickly tapping Barton on the head to get him to call it in.

“No worries,” Barton said after speaking with command. “Just a team comin' in. They're on the list. Done been cleared with command.”

Bucky settled back into the boredom.

Barton offered him a stick of gum. “Lemme get this straight. You only ever fucked your husband.”

“Never saw a reason to fuck anyone else.”

“Yeah, but, that's like-- I could understand if'n you was deeply religious or something. Ne'er mind. Still wouldn't ken it. You never wondered what else you was missing? You know what I'm saying?”

Bucky shrugged and took a drink from his canteen. “If you don't care about who you're doing, it's just a warm hole to put your dick in. Might as well use a fleshlight and save yourself the risk of disease.”

“But...” Barton removed his helmet and scratched an itch before replacing it. “But-- How do ya know you wouldn't like someone else better?”

“Jesus, Mary, 'n Joseph, where's this coming from, Barton?”

“Guess I just been thinking 'bout-- Know what? Ne'er mind.”

“Come on. Don't balls up on me now.”

They didn't get the chance to finish the conversation. The truck that was supposed to be a convoy returning from mission turned out to have been hijacked by Taliban forces. The enemy came in hard and with an advantage, so Barnes ordered Clint to radio for reinforcements while he shouldered his weapon and listened to the popping popcorn that was gunfire.

He used the gate as cover, dodging out whenever there was a lull in shooting to pop off a few rounds. Finally, one of his rounds caught the vehicle's forward tires. It was traveling at such a high rate of speed that the humvee lurched as the driver lost control and toppled onto its side. Militants spilled out to lay down cover fire while someone attempted to get a big fifty cal weapon set up.

A bullet ricocheted off Bucky's helmet and embedded into the packed ground nearby. It was one of those close calls that didn't really register in the heat of the moment. He was too busy trying to pick off the assholes getting the big gun ready for fire.

Thankfully, it didn't take long for reinforcements to flood out of base and set up a defensive line. Given the base's greater numbers, the militants broke ranks quickly enough and fled back into the scrub brush. Colonel Jones ordered a pursuit, so Bucky got his squad organized and set off toward the downed humvee. Several other squads accompanied them.

They pursued the enemy into the hills, but the trail dried up before they could make anything of it. Nothing new. Local fighters knew the terrain far better than Allied forces and had been using it to their advantage since the start of the damn war. The colonel wouldn't take the risk of wasting more troops on looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, so Bucky pulled the squads back. 

Bomb techs were in the process of removing the explosive payload that had been rigged to the humvee by the time they returned. There was a job that took nerves of titanium.

Later, after he finished his shift on guard duty, he entered their barracks and tossed his helmet onto his rack. Only then did he notice the damage from the bullet's impact. It would have struck him right in the frontal lobe had he been wearing gear any shoddier than what they were issued. He slumped onto his cot and shoved fingers through sweaty hair.

Wanda sat beside him and bumped her shoulder against his. The offer to talk didn't need to be vocalized. It was there in her silence, in the way her steady gaze watched his face.

“I only have a year and a half left before I get out, and I could have died today.”

She didn't offer comment, just listened.

“We got a baby on the way, Maximoff. I came that close to leaving Steve with our baby.”

A warm palm settled against his back. “Call him.”

“I already used up my StarkChat time.”

“But I haven't. Use my code. Call him.”

If moisture pricked his eyes and flooded them with wetness, he could always blame it on the sand. That shit got everywhere. His eyeballs felt like shark skin.

Steve answered on the fifth ring, out of breath and cheeks filled with color. “Hi, Bee-bear. I wasn't expecting you to call today. Everything okay?”

“Guess I just missed your face, Rogers.”

“Barnes,” Steve corrected.

Bucky filled his lungs with a long inhale and allowed it to slide out gently. “There was an incident on base today, but I'm all right. I wasn't hurt. Just got me missing you and home. Wanda let me use her StarkChat time.”

“Thank her for me.” A moment of silence passed. “Hey, do you want to see something neat?”

Bucky nodded.

“I'm sending it to your email.”

Wanda, the doll that she was, brought him his phone, and he downloaded the image. His face softened. There was no way to excuse the dampness of tears this time because looking up from his phone screen was an ultrasound of their baby. Peggy was six months and healthy as a horse.

“Doc Banner says everything is going beautifully. The baby's right on developmental schedule, and Peggy's finally gotten some energy back. They say the third trimester starts with a bang.”

“Wait is it-- Is that the baby's--”

“Yeah.”

“A girl,” Bucky breathed.

“We're gonna have a daughter. You know what this means, right? Time to start thinking of names.”

“Petunia!” Riley shouted from somewhere across the room.

“Never Petunia,” Bucky responded.

“Ruby,” Romanoff suggested.

“Jamesonni,” Chai cut in. “Name of an African daisy. Call her Sonni for short.”

From through the door leading out of their barracks, MSG Cadwallader's voice drifted in saying, “Always been partial to Eunice myself.”

Steve's smile was warm and full of pride. “All good suggestions. Oh, while I've got you, I need to know what you think about the color of the nursery.”

That was how Sergeant James Barnes spent the next ten minutes of his gifted StarkChat time, picking out a color scheme for their baby's room. Naturally, they weren't going with pink or blue. They chose a soothing shade of gray on which Steve intended to paint birch trees that would be inhabited by yellow finches, cardinals, and blue jays. With a lighter gray carpet and white furniture, Bucky thought it might look a little minimalist for his tastes, but he really couldn't complain considering he was thousands of miles away and not able to help with putting it together.

He felt less adrift when the call ended and made for the showers to wash away the day's dust. Sleep came easy that night but turned disturbed by dreams of Steve holding their daughter. On the wall rested a Medal of Honor. Bucky's medal of honor. Usually awarded posthumously.

The next morning, he was called to a meeting with Colonel Jones and Master Sergeant Cadwallader along with a few other of the commanding officers residing on base. He cradled a cup of coffee and listened to them drone on about increased troop deployment. Really, he was surprised it had taken “President” Trump as long as it had to start reinforcing military presence in the Middle East.

But the expansion was in full swing now, and they had new recruits coming in almost daily by that point. It was all sold as an effort to stamp out terrorism once and for all. Which was all well and good, but it also meant American forces would never get to come home from the wastes that were Afghanistan and Iraq, and God help them if they decided to invade Iran to boot.

The war mongers who ran the American government simply didn't understand that unless a majority of the native population cooperated with an invading presence (and were therefore invested in reconstruction after war), it meant creating a power vacuum that any warlord could come along and fill. However, the common Republican cared fuck-all about that in their rush to give away military contracts and feed into the ever-growing vitriol of their gun-toting power base. But no one could say they had heard Barnes verbalizing his disillusionment with corporate and governmental America.

Barnes knew better than to express his discontent with their current president. Didn't matter that corporations now paid zero taxes and had a strangle-hold on the American worker, thus forcing them to turn elsewhere for employment to escape the draconian policies in effect now that a businessman had control of the White House. More people than ever enlisted to feed their families and have health insurance or for tuition reimbursement. Just meant there were more people to serve as fodder for the upcoming move to crush the brown people beneath the boot heel of making America great again.

But verbally expressing those thoughts meant he would wind up on the six o'clock news. Next thing he knew, Rush Limbaugh would be orating about “that anti-American fag who refused to support the commander in chief and us homophobic folks were right all alongdon'taskdon'ttell!” Because it was a fact that he wouldn't just be representing his own opinions. Fox news would use him as proof that gay America was full of communist, liberal scum who had no place in the American military. Same way film studios used the mistakes of a female director to say women weren't fit to direct films.

“We've received orders from higher up about a push to eradicate the Taliban. Sources have given us a time and place where several key members of the Taliban hierarchy will have congregated. It's our job to put together various strike teams to launch a multi-pronged assault to take them out at once.”

***

April in Afghanistan was quite pleasant. A balmy seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit with calm winds and mild rainfall. Nothing like what you'd expect from desert and scrub grass. So the problem wasn't boiling inside your helmet; it was staying warm when night fell and temperatures plummeted.

Bucky found himself in charge of three squads all huddled inside their tactical gear. He was flat on his stomach on the roof of a building, occasionally popping up to look through his scope at the small town they'd set up in. Several Taliban leaders were supposed to meet representatives of the Ten Rings, a new gang of thugs taking advantage of the power vacuum left behind by Isis. He wondered if extremists would ever run out of names.

His soldiers fanned out around the town, having infiltrated with the help of local informants. Nat was in temporary charge of one squad. Chai had taken command of the other, leaving Bucky to snipe. Clint served as his spotter.

“Think about it, Sarge,” Barton murmured, presently on his back and looking up at the stars. “You picked one flavor o' cereal to put in your cake hole for the rest o' your life. How can you stand eatin' only one kinda cereal?”

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed. “What's your favorite breakfast food?”

“Johnny Cakes. Barney use ta make 'em for us e'ery mornin'.”

“Barney?”

“Older brother.”

Which was news to Bucky. He had been under the impression Clint was without any other family. “Okay. Imagine you get to eat Johnny Cakes every morning for the rest of your life. That's what having sex with one person's like.”

“But after a while, it's gonna get borin' having nothing but Johnny Cakes.”

He pushed his helmet back and pressed his forehead into his palm briefly. “Okay. Think of it like this. I took one look at Steve when we met and realized that was my human. I'm not curious about what fucking other humans is like because I found mine.”

Clint huffed quietly.

“Look, what's got you so interested in my sex life anyway?”

“Guess I just been thinkin' 'bout--”

Static filled their earpieces seconds before Romanoff's voice bled through. “We have incoming.”

Silence followed.

Bucky lifted back up onto his elbows and looked down the main drag through his sniper scope in time to see headlights pierce the darkness. Three trucks rolled into town. They looked like local jalopies patched together from parts of various other vehicles. Men disembarked wearing white pants and white tunics, heads covered with turbans, and some wearing military style jackets. Weapons were abundant.

He recognized their primary target amidst the Taliban soldiers but couldn't take the shot until the Ten Rings representatives arrived. If they could get both in the same play, their lives would be about a thousand times easier. So he waited.

More trucks arrived from the opposite direction. These were in considerably better shape, military grade for sure. On the doors of each vehicle was painted ten overlapping rings, each circle placed at various angles like rings spinning around a central peg.

The Ten Rings commander approached the Taliban commander. They greeted each other formally, but the distance between Bucky and their targets was too great for him to make out their conversation. He could only trust Chai and his team were recording with the amplifiers.

Bucky breathed in. He settled his finger on the trigger while Clint murmured the calculations necessary to align the shot. It would require two shots in rapid succession. The wind was in their favor. The targets were standing close enough that a double tap would take them out with a minor adjustment in between each shot.

He tapped Barton's wrist once to let him know he had received and understood the calculations. Another even breath inflated his lungs. It slid out. His finger grazed the trigger.

Reneau's voice suddenly came through their comms. “Abort. We have another player in the field.”

Before he could take the short or do anything but blink, the building next to theirs imploded. Flames spewed outward. People screamed. The roof beneath them heaved. They were thrown skyward amidst debris and shrapnel from the initial explosion.

Bucky hit the wall of the building next to theirs.

Riley's jet pack lit up the night sky as he streaked to their location, but he wouldn't arrive soon enough. Something large, maybe part of a car, was thrown by the blast and came down partially on top of Bucky. The pain burned through his nervous system like a forest fire. Then there was silence.

Reality returned in throbbing heartbeats. Light followed by nothing. Light and roaring in his ears. Nothing. A face above his. Nothing. More faces crowded around him. Nothing.

“Barton?” He couldn't hear himself. Breath wheezed from his lungs, but he couldn't hear himself. Maybe he wasn't speaking at all. “Barton?” he tried again, more air than vocalization.

Nothing.

Riley was trying to stem bleeding. Seemed like Chai was in the process of putting an inflatable lift beneath whatever had landed on him in the hopes of levering it off.

Nothing.

There was fire. The acrid scent of smoke billowed around them. There was Scott, his mouth opening and closing with screams but no sound coming out.

Nothing. God, why was there nothing?

Flood lights filled the area. Maybe a chopper?

Scott bumped up and down rhythmically. Beneath him, Clint was laid out on the ground. Took him a second to realize Scott was performing CPR. Nat pulled at her hair. She screamed something. Scott stopped compressions and bent down to breathe into Clint's mouth.

Things faded into nothingness again.

When he woke, medical personnel disembarked from the choppers and tore in their direction. They were asking him something. He couldn't understand their words. Their mouths moved but no sound emerged. Someone took a tool to his kevlar in an attempt to open it.

“Clint?” he demanded. More breath wheezing from his lungs. God, why did breathing hurt so much?

Someone's lips moved. He thought they said “What?”

He tried to point toward Scott and the others, but for some reason, his arm wouldn't move. It felt numb, terrifyingly numb. A sharp stab of pain seared his left leg. Whatever was atop him shifted and finally lifted from his body. 

Chai appeared in his field of vision, his dark face nearly black against the night sky. He said something that Bucky couldn't decipher. Then the man yanked off the bandana he wore around his neck and cinched it tight around Bucky's thigh. The pressure made him scream.

“Clint?” he tried again.

His arm still wouldn't move.

He turned his head in the direction of the triage surrounding Clint. Medics had replaced Scott. One of them opened the man's uniform shirt and cut the olive drab undershirt to place pads on his chest. Everyone removed their hands. The paddles pressed into place. Clint's body arched.

Chai finally figured out what he was trying to say and moved his lips clearly enough for Bucky to understand. “DOA.” Dead on arrival.

Horror snaked through his chest, and Bucky somehow found a surge of strength that allowed him to sit up. Moving freaked out the medics around him, but that was one of his goddamn men. He wobbled and attempted to crawl, dragging his bad leg behind him, in Clint's direction.

They didn't let him get more than a few inches before T'challa pinned him to the ground. Next thing he knew, medics had him strapped onto a backboard that prevented him from getting to Clint. Fuck, why couldn't he move his left arm?

Another jolt of electricity arched Clint's body.

“Breathe,” Bucky tried to scream. “Breathe, goddamn it!”

Clint shuddered suddenly as air rushed into his lungs. 

Even if Bucky couldn't hear it, he could tell by the abject relief on Nat's face that Clint was breathing on his own again. Tears sheeted down her cheeks. She got close enough to pull his head against her stomach, and Clint reached up of his own accord to grasp her bicep.

He didn't get a chance to witness Clint's removal, as the medics lifted his backboard and rushed him aboard an evac chopper where Bucky passed out again.


End file.
